The Fourth Wall gallery is pleased to present innovative new cardboard work by Marilyn Levin  - a recent transplant to the Bay Area from Boston.  Levin began working with repurposed cardboard in 1976.  It won a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and was shown at the Rose Art Museum.  She has recently returned to it.  This is the first time this new body of work has been shown publicly. 

The Unpacked series  is a comment on the refuse that pollutes the environment and taxes the planet's resources. By repurposing found cardboard packaging and leaving the marks of their original use visible, she is making a political statement while creating artwork that can be appreciated formally and aesthetically.

Levin explains, "I work with discarded cardboard – the stained and marked up material that you see on doorsteps, outside supermarkets, almost everywhere. To many, it is trash. My goal is to make it magical."

Abandoning the constraints of stretched canvas, the cardboard allows Levin to explore new surfaces, playing with space, light and shadow in unexpected ways. She straddles sculpture and painting by unfolding, cutting, re-assembling, perforating, stacking, shape-shifting. The existing printed marks, tapes and tears in the cardboard influence her choice of color and form. These rhoplex-embedded archival works juxtapose intense pinks, magentas, silvers and golds with the natural cardboard tones.
 

Most pieces come away from the wall, sometimes wrapping around a corner or extending onto the floor.  Unpacked Orange actually appears to levitate. The volume and uneven depth of the cardboard elements create lines and shapes drawn in shadow, both on the artworks and on the wall. Subtle color shifts occur from an overlaping box flap. Paint drips echo the corrogated patterns that often appear when she tears away the cardboard surface. Loose paint application and bleeding edges create surprises.

Moving lights on some of the pieces cast “dancing” shadow patterns searching for transformative energy.